Column: Britain proves the folly of gun control:
Date: May 17, 2004 9:59 AM
PUBLICATION: Times Colonist (Victoria)
DATE: 2004.05.17
EDITION: Final
SECTION: Comment
PAGE: A6
BYLINE: Lorne Gunter
SOURCE: Edmonton Journal

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Britain proves the folly of gun control: After Britons gave up handguns, the number
of gun crimes almost doubled

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On March 13, 1996, Thomas Hamilton walked into an elementary school in Dunblane,
Scotland, with three pistols and shot dead 16 young children and one of their teachers.

In the wake of this horrific massacre of innocents, a judicial inquiry recommended
more stringent rules for handgun ownership in Britain, but cautioned against an
outright ban.

Politicians being politicians, though, they sought to prove they were acting to
prevent a recurrence of such a shooting (as if anyone can prevent lunatics from
acting insanely) by passing a law forbidding ordinary civilians from possessing
handguns. Handgun owners were given until February 1998 to hand in all their guns.

In all, about 162,000 handguns and 700 tonnes of ammunition were surrendered to
police.

Jack Straw, currently Britain’s foreign secretary, but at the time the home secretary,
pronounced the hand-in a “tremendous success” and predicted it would make
England, Scotland and Wales very much safer.

Last week, the gun-crime statistics for the first five years of this experiment
in citizen disarmament were released. And what has been the result? The incidence
of gun crime in England and Wales has nearly doubled from 13,874 in 1998 to 24,070
in 2003. And the incidence of firearms murder, while thankfully still very small,
has risen 65 per cent.

Politicians being politicians, they of course have not drawn the obvious parallel.
When the statistics were released earlier this week, no official even mentioned
the total handgun ban. (Not even Britain’s Olympic sport shooters are permitted
to own handguns for competition.) It never even occurred to British politicians
and reporters to make a connection. Banning handguns was an important symbol in
the wake of the Dunblane shootings. It was the right thing to do at the time. Its
intended consequences, realized or not, well, they’re secondary.

The ban was a “then” solution, the spiral in gun crime is a “now”
problem — different matters entirely to the chattering classes.

It’s not necessarily the case that the stripping of guns from ordinary, law-abiding
gun owners caused the explosion in gun crime by leaving the population defenceless
against armed criminals. There is almost surely some cause and effect, though.

Another report released last year by Britain’s Home Office revealed that since the
late 1990s, robbery has jumped dramatically, too. It rose by 28 per cent in 2002
alone and, since 1998, there has been an increase in the annual average of muggings
of more than 100,000. England alone has nearly 400,000 robberies each year, a rate
nearly one-quarter higher per capita than that of the United States.

It is entirely likely that some of the increase in the past five years has stemmed
from an increased confidence among criminals that ordinary citizens almost certainly
have no guns in their homes.

But it is unlikely the handgun ban accounts for all or even most of the increase.
France has had a similar upward spike in robberies over the past five years without
banning guns. France, too, now has a violent crime rate at or above the Americans’,
with the exception of murder.

For some reason, no one in the industrialized world murders one another like Americans.
However, in most other categories of violent and property crime, the rest of us
are catching up.

The likely causes of Britain’s crime wave (and France’s and Germany’s and the Netherlands’
and so on) are illegal immigration, drug wars and extremely lenient treatment of
convicted criminals. Holland is set to deport 30,000 failed refugee claimants over
the coming months in part in hopes of reducing high levels of crime.

However, even if confiscating guns from law-abiding citizens does not prompt new
heights of violent crime, it does not follow that seizure is a neutral act.

The best that can be said of it is that it is totally useless.

Yet seizure also amounts to a forfeiture of private property by persons who have
committed no crime (and thus have given the state no legitimate reason to take their
property). So its pointlessness is a deep violation of individual liberty.

If the seizure of private guns does not prevent crime — and from the British example
it is clear it does not — then there is no common good that could possibly justify
seizure.

And if Britain’s mandatory hand-in encouraged even a few hundred robberies and a
handful of murders by emboldening criminals, then the hand-in was a crime by the
state against law-abiding citizens.

Similarly, the registry forced on Canadian gun owners nearly a decade ago has been
totally useless. If taking guns away is not enough to prevent gun crimes, how could
collecting registrations on guns to fill government databases do any better?

The problem is criminals with guns, period. Targeting law-abiding owners, whether
through registration or confiscation, is looking in the wrong place for a solution
to gun crime.

There have been rumours out of Ottawa for months now that the Liberals intend to
make Canada’s registry less intrusive and expensive, friendlier to “legitimate
gun owners.”

Even if it is made less harsh and simpler to use, so long as it continues to focus
on lawful owners instead of criminals, it will merely be a kinder, simpler sort
of useless.